How many times has your husband ever come home from work and said, “I want you to make this WREATH for our front door”? What???
Yes, this actually happened a couple of months or so ago. My husband brought home this
for me to make that happen.
See, it seems that one of his friends at work is talented enough to cut this out of some old barnwood and now it was up to me to finish it. Now, was I up to the task?
I immediately had an idea in mind of what I wanted it to look like, but could I pull it off? Hmm …. no problem, because if you messed it up, just paint over it again. 🙂
Now, I will tell you I wished I’d gone at it differently after I’d gotten started. I painted the edges of the state yellow using plain craft paint (Golden Yellow). I also painted around the outside edges of the top yellow as well, but not the whole top. This is where I wished I’d just painted the whole top yellow … and later I’ll tell you why.
Then I painted over the middle of the top of the state with black craft paint but not all the way to the edges. I just kind of dry brushed out towards the edges because I wanted the yellow to show through. After it dried I went back and tried to add some yellow into the middle of the state with a dry brush but that really didn’t turn out so well. That’s when I wished I’d painted the whole thing yellow so that I could have sanded some of the black off down to the yellow. Instead of trying to add it.
You just keep painting until you get the look you want. If you mess up, just start over. 🙂
Next, I took some rough sandpaper and sanded down the edges where more yellow showed through and then sanded across the black to rough everything up. And then the search was on to find just the right thing to make a perfect dot for USM’s campus. After trying several different things, the winner was a q-tip! A perfect sized dot. It did leave a little tip of paint, but that disappeared when it dried.
I did the opposite with USM. First, I used a Sharpie marker to go over the lines separating the letters. Then I painted the top yellow and edged it with black. I accidentally got some of the black on the yellow and darned if I didn’t end up loving it and “accidentally” got a lot more on it. 😀 It gives it that just right grungy look it needs. When I got it just right, I went over the lines separating the letters again with the Sharpie.
We attached the letters to the state with tiny nails.
My husband and I had a big debate about the bow … can you believe that? What man cares about a bow? But I think he just wanted to make sure ours looked as good or better than theirs. 😉 His friends had used burlap bows on theirs, but that’s not what I envisioned. And it took me a while to get this one just to my liking.
I had one professionally made … scrapped it.
This is more what I had in my mind. I purchased the ribbon at Hobby Lobby and made it myself. Voila!
Love the door hanger and husband is happy! Who knew??
Oh yeah, thanks Wayne for being the talented guy who knows how to cut this out of barnwood. Yeah, like you’re a blog reader. But hey, my husband likes WREATHS! 😀
Leave a Reply